The Boiling Frog Dilemma: Saving Canada from Economic DeclineFood is getting so expensive that grocery executives such as Loblaw Cos. Ltd. chairman and president Galen G. Weston are being hauled before a House of Commons committee this week – after dodging a previous informal invite.
First, even as central banks raise interest rates in an attempt to get inflation under control, food prices are not going to fall back to where they were. In other words, a return to a 2-per-cent inflation target won’t return the price of meat, bread or produce back to 2019 levels. It just means that food prices will continue to rise, only a bit more slowly.. Until that point, the global political and economic order had mostly been settled.
What lies ahead geopolitically is hard to predict. But with tensions building between China and the United States, not to mention troubling developments in places such as North Korea and the Middle East, it’s likely that the world will be rocked by more military tension. That could further disrupt trade in agriculture, and in turn, intensify food insecurity.
It all underscores the enormity of the crisis we are headed for, and it’s because of one obvious truth: You have to eat. Along with fresh drinking water and shelter, food is one of the few things humans absolutely require to live.